DOUGLAS POST When examining complicated business or institutional sites, it is frequently difficult to separate the role of the individual from that of the organization itself, even though we may want to characterize our observations in terms of the organization. We would like to say that "Time Warner did this" or "The Army did that" even though these institutions are large aggregations of many individuals, each with separate roles, abilities, and power. Conversely, we sometimes may wish to insert particular individuals into technology studies, seeing Steve Jobs-ness in Apple's iPod or Sam Walton-ness in Walmart. How does Douglas handle the interplay of individuals and institutions in her early history of radio? (Marconi or Fessenden may provide good examples.) What are the most useful ways to differentiate and characterize the roles of individuals from those of institutions that employ them? ::::::::: As Nicholas points out, Douglas approach is a personalized one. The history she is telling us sometimes is as romantic as the sources she uses for writing it. By focusing in the inventors/entrepeneurs she is able to create an interesting narrative plenty of anecdotes, biographical details, and of course, drama and suspense. I agree with Nicholas in that the five first chapters can be described as a sort of psychohistory due to the little attention Douglas puts in explaining/critizicing the political, economical, and cultural contradictions that characterize the society were these men were competing/inventing/incorporating. Personally, I think Douglas does not do very well what Stuart describes in his post as a "triangulation" between ideology, individual, and corporation. By focusing in the anecdotical and biographical detail, Douglas tends to ignore the political and economical contradictions that also shaped the competition among the inventors. She success in telling us the myth of the inventor-hero but she scarifies differentiating the roles of the individuals from those of the institutions where they worked. I don't think this is a failure though, I think it is just a practical and stylistic choice. ------------------------------- stuart Building off of Carolyn Marvin’s text from last week, I think it is important not only to interrogate the connections between individual inventors and the companies with whom they collaborate, but the ways in which inventors are also heavily influenced by ideological pressures coming out of the larger socio-cultural discourse in which they practice (in Douglas’ account, the discourse of the “inventor as hero” is the primary ideological trope). Therefore, it might be useful to think about the inventor in a triangular relationship with both his company and the ideological discourse of his historical moment she identifies a myth of the inventor as individual hero as the operant ideological construct fueling all of these men. In the first chapter, she explains the roots of this myth. Guided heavily by beliefs in the power of men over nature and (more importantly) the ability of American capitalism to empower the individual, this myth cast inventors as heroes capable of recovering the role of the individual as capable of saving society from the control of faceless corporate and governmental bureaucracies. This ideology had a strong impact on the way inventors positioned themselves. As the most ideological ensconced of the individuals discussed, De Forest provides an excellent illustration of the impact of this trope on practicing inventors. Because he had such an ideological and even affective attachment to his identity as an inventor-hero, De Forest would often conduct risky and unorthodox experiments in the name of some perceived greater good. This example from De Forest’s career illustrates the power of the ideological discourse of the inventor-hero on actions taken by inventors. Beyond the pressures exerted on these two inventors by this discourse of invention in the United States at the turn of the century, they also had to negotiate other forms of ideological prejudice along the lines of ethnicity and class. If ethnicity threatened Marconi’s status as an inventor, economic and social class almost exclusively determined most of De Forest’s decisions. On a practical level, he could not afford the kind of training and support that Marconi’s family status or the professional affiliations of Fessenden and Stone afforded. On a more ideological level, De Forest’s exclusion from the upper classes occupied by most other inventors created an often uncontrollable urge in him to direct all of his actions towards claiming for himself a position in the upper classes. For both Marconi and De Forest, larger societal stereotypes profoundly cut through their positions as members of the inventor class. Recapitulating my argument, the inventors were caught in a triadic configuration in which they occupied one point while feeling the forces of both their own businesses at the second point and the larger ideological fields of both their professions as “inventor-heroes” and their racial and socioeconomic/cultural identities at the third ---------- Nicholas I think it’s fair to say that Douglas’s approach is a highly personalized one. One interesting thing to note is that, for me at least, Douglas does not reduce corporations directly down to one person, which would result in Marconi the man being a direct stand-in for Marconi the corporation, but she rather seems to regard corporate actions simply as being secondary to the thoughts, goals, drives and aspirations of the singular inventors at the company’s core. This allows Douglas to put aside the ultimate failure of companies like De Forest and NESCO, and to focus on the technical, social, and cultural innovations that their founders were responsible for. I suppose it’s a consequence of writing cultural history that people, as opposed to corporations, come to the forefront. it might be an interesting topic of conversation in class – is the degree to which people think Douglas is attempting a kind of psychohistory here. De Forest, for example, is the greedy fame-seeker; Fessenden is the pretentious scientist (even though he apparently held no college degrees and came up under the tutelage of Edison, who, as we learned last week, was not considered part of the scientific establishment by electrical insiders); and Marconi is the publicly reserved, privately ambitious gentleman. Douglas uses these characterizations to color each inventors actions, sometimes coming close to what seems to me to be an overly short form of shorthand. She is quick to credit De Forest’s conception of radio as a broadcast medium, for example, to the loneliness and class anxieties that not being able to afford good opera seats caused him. She makes a clear connection here to his childhood, seemingly without evidentiary support. My doubts here may well be without merit, but I would be interested in hearing what other people thought about this aspect of the book. ----------------------------- Megan Douglas presents a complex relationship between individuals and institutions in the early history of radio. Individuals (most often inventors) offer both opportunities and challenges to existing institutions – just as various institutions represent both opportunities and challenges to inventors. Throughout Inventing American Broadcasting, Douglas frames the success or failure of competing technological systems in terms of their success in the corporate, the technological, and the journalistic realms, and the relationship between individual and institution can be examined through these three related lenses. While individual inventors worked increasingly in corporate research labs, the inventors themselves played a role in offering a compelling “face” and relatable identity to corporations. Douglas notes that the often the inventor-hero was often used symbolically to bridge between old and new worlds, between the tinkerer and the new professional corporate inventor. However, whether a technological system will be adopted and how it will be interpreted does not rest entirely with the individual inventor or with the corporate institution. Douglas notes that the relationship between individuals and institutions was dynamic and reciprocal, but was mediated by the media. She writes: “Individual inventors interacted with corporations, the government, and the press; amateur operators constructed their own sets of meanings around radio, meanings with which large institutions had to come to terms. The press often symbolically mediated these interactions and in doing so gave voice to certain ideas and silenced others”(xxvii). Thus, the media itself represents a very significant institution in the early development of radio. Douglas notes that the press presented and endorsed “certain attitudes towards radio, [defining] a pattern of ideas and beliefs about how radio should be used and who should control it”(xvii). The media reported on certain aspects of the development of wireless and excluded others, shaping how the technology was adopted and interpreted as much, if not more, than corporate interests and the inventors themselves. ---------------------------------